Capital markets bankers at Bank of America Merrill Lynch were busy on both sides of the Atlantic this week, working on landmark debt and equity raisings.

On Monday, Bank of America Merrill Lynch was named as a bookrunner on the largest corporate bond by a US issuer on record. A day later it emerged the bank was helping German car-maker Volkswagen issue a convertible bond that one banker told Financial News was the “largest corporate mandatory convertible deal ever”, excluding financials.

AbbVie, a planned spin-off of Abbott Laboratories’ research-based pharmaceuticals business, issued a $14.7bn investment-grade bond on November 5. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and JP Morgan were bookrunners on all six tranches of the bond. BNP Paribas, Societe Generale, Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland were also involved.

The deal got away successfully despite having been moved by a week to avoid the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which closed US financial markets for two days.

Doug Muller, managing director, investment-grade capital markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said: “We did extensive pre-marketing with investors so that they understood exactly which businesses would be going into the new company and they also had the comfort of a parent company guarantee until the spin-off is effective.”

Andrew Karp, head of investment-grade syndicate at the bank, said: “Although AbbVie was a new issuer, investors are always looking to diversify into new high-quality names and it helped that Abbott was carrying out a tender at the same time which freed up their capacity to buy new paper.”

The deal did not affect the league table rankings of any of the eight banks involved and Bank of America Merrill Lynch remains fifth in the global debt capital markets league tables, according to Dealogic.

It is understood there were more than 1,200 orders generating over $40bn of demand for the bond. Karp said: "We dedicated resources to the deal to ensure there were no bottlenecks and since it was a well forecasted transaction we were able to get the order book built in the morning."

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Muller said AbbVie could have increased the size of the deal or added new tranches but wanted to raise just enough to meet the new company’s needs and to have the best capital structure for the business.

In Europe, the VW convertible bond will pay investors a 5.5% coupon until its mandatory maturity in November, 2015 and carries a conversion price of €185.4. At $3.2bn, it is the largest European equity-linked deal since KfW’s $5.1bn convertible bond in May 2008, according to Dealogic.

Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse also worked on the deal.

Craig Coben, head of equity capital markets for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said: “This is the first time we have seen a major European equity-linked instrument sold predominately to US long-only investors. We argued all along that outright US institutions would support the offering.”

About half of the demand came from the US, with roughly 30% from the UK and the rest from around the world, according to bankers working on the deal.

US investors are the most familiar with mandatory convertible bonds and this helped VW achieve better pricing on the bond, according to Yacine Amor, head of Emea equity-linked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He said: “They secured a 5.5% coupon but, if the deal had been marketed in Europe only, they would have had to pay at least 6%.”

Coben added the deal had been marketed by bankers working across the bank’s convertibles and cash equities desks in London, Frankfurt, New York and Hong Kong: “We had to build two separate books and explain two sides of the deal to investors - the story of VW and the technical parameters of the instrument.”

The VW deal comes amid a flurry of convertibles issuance from European issuers. Amor said that this quarter has been the biggest quarter for European convertible bond issuance for years, with $10.5bn worth of equity-linked paper issued since September.